December brings holiday cheer and end-of-year accounting, both professional and personal, to the fore. We push ourselves to achieve what we had hoped we would at the beginning of the year, realising past-due goals and working on new resolutions, checking out the latest trends and fads to invest in. Between celebrations, events, parties, lunches, brunches, dinners, and sparkling midnight gatherings, there is no time for living mindfully, let alone to breathe and reflect, think and plan, to chart a way forward and decide what we want from the year ahead. Dizzying is the madness that defines the last bit of the year; exciting is the new beginning that stares us in the face for the year ahead. Our well-being isn’t measured by the wealth we amass or by the state of our mental and physical health. It is the aggregate, the sum of the totality of the life we live, in which we love, work, grow and exist. Our spiritual journeys, our mental and emotional state, our environmental safety and interconnectedness to it, our professional stability and growth, our social standing and agency, our fiscal solvency, our fearlessness in discovery of life and self — when we are able to manage and get a handle on these aspects of our lives, we are able to live, love, learn and manage life in ways both effective and comforting. When I was barely a handful of years old and living with my parents in Nagpur, simple interactions made my life seem blessed and complete, full and fulfilled. I had a family life in which I felt safe and comfortable and my school was not too competitive, so my mind wasn’t pushed beyond my safe parameters to learn and grow. I was powered with buoyant energy from a social network of neighbours and schoolmates who kept me energised with just the inspiration I required. I was safe, well-loved and adored with healthy relationships at home, at school and around the neighbourhood. I was a happy kid, with plenty of positive energy. When I arrived in New York City at the age of 20 and started college at School of Visual Arts, I felt blessed that I had an abundance of opportunities and an ever-growing roster of acquaintances and friends. I arrived in NYC to study graphic design, but it was retail that I engaged in professionally. Doors opened wide for me, and the more fearless I was in accepting the unknown invitations from life, the fuller and more thrilling my life became. I found a new métier, a calling to become a chef. In teaching cooking classes, catering memorable meals for clients, working hard with co-writers to pen three cookbooks, being chef of three restaurants in the US and consulting for several, and also shepherding food programmes at large corporate dining centres across the US through my work with a multinational, I felt whole, full and fulfilled, even when life around me seemed bleak and broken. I am now 51 years of age in the country of my birth. I feel young again in India, a nation on an upward trajectory, bursting with opportunities and peerless potential. I so wish I was 20 today, as I could do much more and reap even greater rewards for my effort. But I am thrilled to have many young mentees and friends who indulge me with patient friendship and who promulgate my doctrine on life and living. Mine are lessons learned from living a life with careless abandon, with fearless hunger, with utmost confidence in self, and with mindful knowledge that I am just another mortal human, with beautiful and ugly bits and bobs, in whose unison I become a complete and happy me. As I get ready to bid adieu to 2023 and start 2024, I wish to be a more mindful human being. When we live and love with purpose and give equality of value to the other, we find ourselves living and loving harmoniously. When we surround ourselves with diversity and include in our midst those who have very different thoughts and beliefs, we find others being similarly inclusive and generous towards us. When we stop feeling as if we can micromanage life, we begin to live and find our real passions and callings, as I did when I became a chef instead of a designer. I hope to never stop trusting and being transparent, because no matter how badly we have been broken and cheated before, we cannot assume another is going to hurt us. In freeing ourselves from the negativity of assumption, we become one with life and one with self. And in doing so, as we go past the need to chase fads and trends, we start living the life we were sent on the earth to live and our well-being is nothing shortof extraordinary.
